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Valve's Steam Box Will Most Likely Use An X.Org Server

03-05-2013, 04:30 PM

Phoronix: Valve's Steam Box Will Most Likely Use An X.Org Server

In the flurry of polarized discussions that have emerged since yesterday's Ubuntu Mir announcement, some have speculated that Valve's interactions with Ubuntu may have had a hand in them developing their own display server. This is most likely not the case and the first-generation Linux-based Steam Box from Valve will almost surely be running an X.Org Server...

That makes sense, Michael.
I overlooked the following piece of information in yesterday's IRC log: RAOF (Canonical employee)

00:52 <soreau> RAOF: So I'm steam and I want to port my client to wayland. '.. or was it Mir.. or was it, wait lemme check phoronix..'. Now what API do I choose for the official proprietary steam client that doesn't use X?
00:53 <RAOF> Well, if you're Valve, you probably use X for another couple of years.
00:53 <RAOF> Then you see what's out there.

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Gabe - get a grip man! You steered your entire ship to Linux from Windows, and now you're going to go with a 30+ year old X server? For Christ's sake, bite the bullet and help Intel and those guys who slave to their Wayland cause man. Give a little of that flush green happiness to the Wayland/Linux community. Take one for the team, do it for the people and set the world free - stop being concerned with JUST Steam's bottom line, mmkay now?

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It's fairly obvious that Valve will use an NVidia GPU, there's simply no other credible choice for pure gaming (meh ...). Although a Haswell would have "ok" performance for 720p, it wouldn't be impressive enough for that market ...

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Gabe - get a grip man! You steered your entire ship to Linux from Windows, and now you're going to go with a 30+ year old X server? For Christ's sake, bite the bullet and help Intel and those guys who slave to their Wayland cause man. Give a little of that flush green happiness to the Wayland/Linux community. Take one for the team, do it for the people and set the world free - stop being concerned with JUST Steam's bottom line, mmkay now?

What about supporting Ubuntu, Valve's "favorite version of Linux", when they swap to Mir?

I have to wonder whether this will set a precedent. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in my understanding, if the developer of an application chooses to support Mir, they lose customers using non-Ubuntu distros. If they support Wayland, they lose customers using Ubuntu. However, both Wayland and Mir (will) have backwards compatibility with X, making it the only option allowing you to sell your product to all Linux users. If I were to hazard a guess, Canonical may have, in dividing Linux's desktops between Mir and Wayland, ensured that the continued use of X is a necessity.

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Neither Wayland nor MIR is ready for daily use, why should anyone at this point use it?

Valve has sufficient heft (e.g. $$$) to influence NVidia's efforts in assisting with the driver development for Steam's console. They can certainly influence it to help with Wayland - the only difference between those two contexts is the motive - one is for profit the other one is benevolence.

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uh,im not all that super in touch with programming, put i was under the impression that nobody writes applications for X or wayland or dur(mir). you write your application with toolkits and middlelayer apis like gtk or sdl and let those libraries handle all that bullcrap. if anything this will be more of a reason for these middle layers to focus on runtime linking to a display server, like te waffle idea. i for one am all for such a setup, so long as it takes as long as its going to take and connocal can suffer for another one of its dumbass decisions it keeps making. i remember like 6-7 years ago or whatever when ubuntu first came out and i couldt figure out why people kept forking distros off debian testing rather than just contribute to debian. before ubunt it was memphis and im shure there was more, and all they did was ust make the instalation of a couple proprietary drivers a little easier. ubuntu started off as debian testing + preinstall scripts for nvida drivers, whitch any intermediat linux user could do with any number of the howto guides floating around. now ubuntu is just debian experimental + undesiarble betaware that hides all of what it means to be linux. the only reason ubuntu is the so called #1 distro is because anyone new to linux hears about ubuntu first, its often that they hear "ubuntu" and dont even hear the terms "linux" or "gnu". id be willing to be that ubuntus numbers are inflated simply because its the new user tryout distro, its like what knoppix really should be. i dont think a lot of people end up using ubuntu longterm on their main pc. it also doesnt help that the linux tech websites contantly use ubuntu as a benchmark platform simply because you can do a fresh install to running nvidia drivers the fastest.

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Well i said this has the hand of Valve and continue saying so....in the other thread i referred precisely the Valve supports 12.04 LTS for a reason....5 years of support..and it's obvious that they will use X....no alternative at ALL in any time soon.

But by when the 12.04 LTS support ends, Mir, Wayland or both will be ready for prime time and i bet that Valve will use Mir unless Canonical screws it....

Then we will have and free OS upgrade for SteamBoxes and/or SteamBox II

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I work at a sales\repair shop and I could build a Steam box. Anybody can. I could choose to use Linux or even Windows. If I chose Windows I'd have to include that into the cost of the box of course...

The point being that you guys are in here acting like there will only be a single Steam box... And that isnt gonna be how it is.. There will be plenty of options to choose from. I'm sure some will use AMD APU's, others Will use Intel APU's and Still others will use nVidia dicrete GPU's. Some will be cheaper than others and some will be more capable than others.

There isnt going to be a SteamBox II..... Your hardware either meets the requirements for the games you own or it doesnt. Minimum requirements will vary game by game just as it does today.